John Mellerick wrote:
> 
> Well, in August of this year, I did pretty much the same set of experiments,
> and wrote up a short article, which you can read at:
> 
> http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~element/areaLights/
> 
> Now, I didn't have all my facts straight when I wrote it, and the subsequent
> flame war that was targeted at me on povray.general quickly pointed out
> that Povray's arealights are *not* designed to give area illumination, but
> simply to simulate area *shadows*. I agree though, a source of area
> illumination in Povray would be most welcome...

And slow. Which, as I recall, was half the reason for the "flame war"; 
you claimed reasonable speeds for your point light arrays, but you were 
using very simple scenes for your tests, and anyone used to creating 
complex scenes in POV-Ray (or any other raytracer I've seen, for that 
matter) knows that adding more lights can have a major impact on render 
times.. a fact which you stubbornly refused to accept, based on your 
limited testing.

Generally speaking, I don't think a point light array object is needed; 
they are easily written with loops, which would also provide more 
control over the individual lights in the array than an object's syntax 
probably would. The only real benefit I can see to having such an object 
would be if POV-Ray could make reasonable assumptions about a predefined 
light array that would make rendering faster than an improvised one, but 
I have no idea whether this would be the case.

-Xplo

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